UPDATE: Ben Harmon died late Friday afternoon, three weeks after this story was published. His mom, Marcia Harmon, says he "passed peacefully. We were all with him holding his hand and talking to him."

ORIGINAL STORY: Shirtless and wearing an Obama mask, Ben Harmon is flying across the Avon High football field. If you know him at all, you know this moment is so Ben. He’s up for anything, this kid, and not in a bad way but in that big-grin, high-energy, school-spirit sort of way that draws kids and even adults like steel shavings to a magnet.

This is Avon vs. Brownsburg in 2015, a rivalry game featuring two of the top high school quarterbacks in the country (Avon’s Brandon Peters will win IndyStar Mr. Football that year and sign with Michigan; Brownsburg’s Hunter Johnson wins Mr. Football in 2016 and goes to Clemson), and ESPN is televising it live. Avon scores and now it’s a break in the action, a commercial, when Ben Harmon peels off his shirt and puts on the mask. He hops a fence near the goalposts and comes chugging out of the end zone.

Ben Harmon races across the Avon football field wearing a Barack Obama mask.(Photo: Varsity Views)

He crosses the 20, the 30, the 40 …

Under the lights the field stretches ahead, as open and endless as a young man's future, and he’s cruising toward both. Ben is one of the fastest runners at Avon High, a 4½-minute miler, but he isn’t just fast; he’s brilliant. He’s one of the top scorers on Avon’s national championship calculus team, he’s an A-plus student in two different AP physics classes, and he’ll graduate 17th in a class of nearly 700. He’s going to Purdue. Going to be an engineer.

The 50, the 40 …

Standing in the bleachers, his mom is laughing. She has no idea who's under that mask, and she’s a school teacher herself, but she can’t help but giggle at the sight of some shirtless kid pointing at the crowd as he glides past. It is Sept. 11, 2015 – it is 9-11 – and at Avon the theme for this annual rivalry game is patriotism. Look closer: The kid in the Obama mask is wearing red, white and blue shorts. Marcia Harmon holds up her cell phone and takes a picture.

The 30, the 20 …

Behind the end zone is another fence, and a waiting car. Ben and two of his buddies have planned this whole thing out, start to finish – “The extraction point,” Ben calls the getaway car – and he’s almost there. He’s big and strong, 6 feet of long legs and ripped abs, and he’s revving toward the end zone. His race is almost over.

The chemotherapy isn’t working anymore, and the bone-marrow transplant scheduled for last week was called off because the cancer in his hip is too far along. He’s home now, being doted on by family and friends and resting as comfortably as he can. All that’s left are experimental options and clinical trials, and doctors keep asking: Does he want to fight or …?

Fight, Ben says. Always: Fight.

He’s fighting for himself, for sure, but also for his parents (Marcia and William), for his step-mother (Kim), his brothers (Will and Caleb) and sister (Julia), his friends.

Ben, second from left, surrounded by siblings Caleb Disney, Will and Julia.(Photo: Marcia Harmon)

“That’s who he is,” says one of his best friends, Ryan Dickison.

“Ben has always thought of others,” says his dad.

Near as anyone can tell, Ben views his battle with cancer through the prism of his family and friends. They were the ones coming into his hospital room, shocked into awkward silence by the sight of all those tubes pumping medicine into his frail body, and Ben was the one sitting up, the one smiling, the one breaking the ice:

Ask me anything, he’d say. What do you want to know?

Well, OK. Ben and I were texting a few days ago, so I asked him this: What do I tell people about your condition?

“As of right now we're out of super-aggressive chemo options and it's down to smaller experimental options,” he texted back. “No known cure at this point, just along for the ride and if I'm lucky there will be a miracle breakthrough.”

Just along for the ride …

That’s so Ben. So is this: When doctors gave him the devastating news May 25 about the bone-marrow transplant no longer being viable, Ben kept it to himself. His younger brother, Will, was graduating that night from Avon High, and Ben didn’t want to spoil his big weekend. His dad and stepmom knew – Ben lives with them – but he waited two days before calling his mom. There were tears, and then Marcia said:

Marcia tells me that story, and then says: “That's Ben. Always thinking of how the rest of us feel, instead of feeling sorry for himself.”

Says Ben’s stepmom, Kim: “On good days, he’ll tell you he’s doing great. On the days that aren’t so great, he will tell you he’s doing good because that’s what he does.”

* * *

Ben Harmon(Photo: Courtesy of Mary Ellen Beard)

Sciatica, they thought. His hip was sore, and down into his leg. Something was pinching a nerve, they thought. And something was.

The pain wasn’t much, at first, and Ben was running through it. He helped Avon’s cross country team win sectional in 2015, then regional. After placing fourth individually at sectional and 11th at regional, Ben was the team’s top scorer at state, where Avon finished 14th. He had the speed and endurance to run an outdoor 5K in 16:09, but the power to sprint 400 meters in 52 seconds. His personal-best in the 800 was 2:02, but he was going to crack the 2-minute barrier as a track senior.

But the pain in his leg, in his hip, it kept getting worse. Running? He could barely sit anymore. He’d go to school, take a test, get an A or A-plus, and go home. One day he couldn’t go to school at all. Hurt too much to get dressed.

Stupid sciatica …

His dad insisted: You need an MRI.

It showed what it showed. The tumor. Ewing’s Sarcoma, it’s called, a rare form of bone cancer that often targets young male athletes, and it doesn’t move slowly. Ben missed his senior season of track, and nearly his graduation. His buddy Andrew Griffin rolled him across the stage for his diploma, where Ben rose to his feet to accept it. You know that request to “please hold your applause,” because a 700-person ceremony otherwise would take forever? Yeah, they broke that rule at Avon’s 2016 graduation. And it was the senior class breaking it, erupting as Ben stood.

The Harmon family gathered for a photograph on Ben's high school graduation day. From left: Ben's brother Will, mom Marcia, Ben, his sister Julia.(Photo: Photo courtesy of Marcia Harmon)

He’s the magnet, remember. We are the steel shavings. The track team brought its sectional trophy to the hospital room to show Ben, and before the state meet in Bloomington they printed up photos of Ben’s face and put them on sticks, carrying them around the track.

“Flat Ben,” they called it, and Flat Ben was everywhere that final semester at Avon: On the homemade boat, the USS Ben, his friends in AP physics constructed for their final project. In the dugout of the Avon baseball team at sectional. On the T-shirts every senior wore to graduation practice on the football field, where they gathered into three groups to form a single word across the field where he had sprinted so shirtlessly, so memorably, eight months earlier:

B E N

That night at the official ceremony, the Avon High class of 2016 wore #BenStrong T-shirts under their graduation attire. Seniors were peeling back the gown to reveal Ben’s name across their chest, the way Clark Kent would rip open his shirt to reveal that large ‘S’.

* * *

Ben made it to Purdue.

Took him a year after high school graduation, but he beat his cancer into remission and announced it on Instagram by posting a picture of a yellow ribbon above the words: “After 10 long months I’ve finally decided to break up with Ewing’s. She was too controlling and wouldn’t let me do the things I wanted to do. I’m so excited to see all my friends again and to get back to doing normal, reckless things all the time!”

Ben spent the fall 2017 semester on campus at West Lafayette, long enough to be named president of his Sigma Chi pledge class and to make so many friends – he vowed to stop two strangers every day on campus and get to know them – that his phone never seems to stop buzzing. Texts, calls. It’s like a bumblebee in his pocket: Buzzzzzzz ….

When the cancer was rediscovered this past fall, Ben came home to his hospital, his oncologist. Purdue came with him. His advisor drove to Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital to proctor his exams. Purdue guard Ryan Cline visited him there, with a basketball signed by coach Matt Painter.

Ben shared the relapse news the way Ben does these things. He posted a photo of himself smiling and draping an arm over a massive radiation machine, with the words:

“Had an amazing time with my second linear accelerator these past few weeks! I guess my taste hasn’t changed much since the (first) run through. To update, I found out not too long ago that I have bone cancer again. A relapse of the Ewing’s Sarcoma like before. I’m doing chemo and I just wrapped up a quick 20 rounds of radiation with this baby! In other news all is well, the New York Islanders are a playoff team, and any thoughts and prayers are much appreciated.”

* * *

Ben was never going to get away with that shirtless streaker prank. Kids knew, and kids talked, and the school administration would have found out anyway. The boy in the Obama mask was built too well and moving too fast to be anything but a track athlete, and a great one. Someone sent Avon coach Zach Toothman a picture of the streaker, and Toothman knew.

“Form, mechanics – I knew exactly who that was,” Toothman says, and he’s not mad. He was never mad.

Nobody at Avon was mad, not even the administration, which meted out discipline – he was held out of the next meet, at Carmel, and made to clean up the football stadium – on a student they knew was special. It wasn’t his greatness at athletics or academics. It was his ... greatness. Put it this way: Before school one morning, Ben received $100 in birthday money. That day, students were raising money for some sort of charity. Ben donated $100.

Another story: The Avon DECA class goes to New York City early in Ben’s senior year. Lots of walking, as you can imagine, and Avon student body president Grace Langford has come to NYC with a hip injury. She’s limping and wincing and eventually Ben offers his back and carries his good friend through Central Park.

Another story, a sillier one: The cross country team had a race the morning after Ben streaked across the football field. Ben’s mom is at the course, standing with other parents, when someone asks: “Was that Ben last night?” Marcia Harmon says what she believes to be true, no, it wasn’t Ben, when another mom on the team – the mom of Ben’s getaway driver, as it turns out – tells her what she knows:

“I have it on good authority it was Ben,” she tells Marcia. “And I found an Obama mask at the top of our stairs this morning.”

Marcia Harmon is telling me that story, and she’s just giggling. She’s a teacher herself, third grade at River Birch Elementary in Avon, and she knows, she knows: Bad Ben! Very bad!

But she knows other things, too, things no parent should ever have to learn.

“Although I can't as an agent of the school system condone such behavior,” Ben's mom tells me, “now I’m glad that it happened, that he ran freely that night, because soon he would no longer be able to run, and he would no longer be free. And that hurts. So I'm glad he had that moment, and I don't regret him doing it for a second. He needed to do it. None of us knew why then. But we do now.”

Conceived as a prank, that dash under the lights in September 2015 has become something entirely else. For those who were there, for those who love Ben Harmon, it is the memory of a lifetime, and he is forever young.